Talk about the wars in class without the self-flagellation
The issue of New Zealand history being taught in New Zealand high schools is one that has attracted as much heat as light lately.
Why are students studying this and not that? Why are educational authorities seemingly so resistant to change? Whose history is being taught and what effect does this have on our collective understanding of our past and ourselves?
As someone who elected to study history at high school, these are issues I feel I should have a definite opinion on. There can be little doubt as to the majority view, or at least what is taken as the majority view, attracting headlines and expressions of liberal sentiment.
To clarify my thinking, I decided to give my old high school history teacher a call. Who better to ask than someone from the ‘‘chalk face’’, a professional who taught with skill, wit and understanding for three decades or more?
Mike Burr’s precise recall of the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-form syllabus from the early 1980s refreshed my memory. He was predictably articulate as to why Tudor and Stewart history was favoured at seventh-form level over a New Zealand option that existed even then, some 34 years ago.
Rotorua Boys’ High did not have the texts and study guides for such a programme. Later in his career, when Burr shifted to Taranaki, the opposite was true. After professional development that reflected and complemented his own MA thesis on the New Zealand wars, he taught New Zealand history, 1840-1920.
In the current climate, the teaching of Tudor and Stewart history has attracted criticism, as though it were the scholastic equivalent of all those bodiceripping television series, an irrelevancy disconnected from the pressing issues of the moment or simply an uncomfortable reminder of cultural roots no longer much cherished in a country mindful of its Pacific location.
Against this shallow populism, Burr’s views are refreshing. He argues the value of the study is to acquaint students with the journey from the medieval to recognisably modern constitutional monarchy, providing an introduction to the political traditions of Western democracy. Moreover, ‘‘we ought not to forget that what happened in Britain between 1558 and 1689 laid the foundations for what happened in the New Worlds of both hemispheres and in postindependence ex-colonies’’.
Given his research into the New Zealand wars and subsequent forays into historical fiction in the same area, Burr’s attitude toward the clamour for curriculum reform is worth noting. He is suspicious of any teaching of history that lacks intellectual rigour, or is bound to predetermined themes in the manner of ‘‘the b ...... child known as social studies’’.
To teach the New Zealand wars ‘‘so we can self-flagellate’’ about how Ma¯ ori were wronged is to yield to a populist sense of ‘‘what everyone knows’’, to reduce complex issues to crude generalisations. As he notes in his thesis introduction, ‘‘the struggles of the 1860s were not merely Ma¯ ori versus European, for many Ma¯ ori fought for the white man and one or two white men fought for the Ma¯ ori. . . neither were they civilisation versus barbarism, for atrocities on both sides not withstanding, the protagonists often found occasion to honour each other’s bearing, dignity and courage. . . They were, in short, nothing that falls readily into discernible categories of black or white, right or wrong, good or bad.’’
If the New Zealand wars are to be taught – and he is in favour of this as much as the next historian – Burr argues they should be done in a wider context.
His suggestion again warrants quotation: ‘‘The evolution of a nation from colonial beginnings to membership of the world community and involving such things as the economic bases of existence at varying stages, the social, political and sporting context of what it is to be a Kiwi, the struggle for the franchise and a more indepth frame for what you studied as NZ foreign policy from colony to ballsy member of the UN.’’
It is doubtful that such a focus would satisfy the agendas of those making noise about these issues. Perhaps my old teacher is another of ‘‘yesterday’s men’’, to be condemned for his age and skin colour.
For me, he is still the master – a man not given to suffer fools, bend to trends or let politics get in the way of the truth.